A Holistic Humanities of Speaking: Franz Boas and the Continuing Centrality of Texts
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Abstract
We take up Boas’s commitment to the establishment of a large corpus of texts from the indigenous languages and peoples of the Americas, examining what we take to be his fundamental principles: using texts as the philological record from which to document and explore language, culture, and intellectual life on their own terms; training speakers to engage in documentation through the creation and analysis of texts; and a focus on the emergence of patterns and interrelationships. We then outline what we see as his influence up to now, both directly through the kinds of projects he promoted and indirectly through a broader application of Boasian principles that has animated a series of later movements. Finally, we discuss the prospects for a more comprehensive text- and documentation-centered approach to language and culture that welds together these themes and movements, and which we envision as a holistic humanities of speaking.
1. Introduction
Language and speaking are fundamentally social and cultural phenomena, as much as they are rooted in biology. As Friedrich (2006:219) argues in his review of ethnopoetics, “culture is a part of language just as language is a part of culture.” Speech play and verbal art demand a broad and humanities-inspired approach to language. It may seem strange that, at a time when the humanities are often seen as on the wane, we argue for a re-engagement, but we see this as precisely the line of thinking found in Franz Boas’s concern with Native American texts and verbal art, a bulwark of his original charter for the International Journal of American Linguistics (IJAL) (Boas 1917), whose centennial we now observe. We do not want to cast our approach within the old and debilitating debate between “science” and the “humanities”; rather we want to suggest, following Hymes (2003) and Jakobson (1944), that Boas’s “humanities” was at once empirical, deductive, and humanistic, thus embracing both scientific and humanistic perspectives in a holistic approach. Boas’s approach laid out grammar itself in minimal, axiomatic terms to allow the specifics of individual grammars to shine forth, and used texts as the basis for multipronged philological inquiry into language, ethnology, and beyond. We call this holistic approach a “humanities of speaking,” which we understand as including rather than opposing a science of speaking. We describe the development of this approach since Boas and argue that it provides a path into the future for Americanist linguistics and anthropology. Such an approach reunites linguistics and anthropology with their philological origins (Turner 2014); moreover, it is an approach that is very much associated with Boas and his vision of both linguistics and anthropology.
We understand the Boasian framework to be focused on texts as the basis for all linguistic and ethnological study, embracing a holistic perspective that avoids stark dichotomies. It eschews evolutionary scenarios that meant to rank-order languages and, so too, peoples and their verbal artistry. For Boas, texts offer access to questions of grammar, style, history, and culture; furthermore, they provide crucial insights into indigenous perspectives or “fundamental ethnic ideas,” and a relativist concern that Boas presents as a kind of multi-perspectivalism (i.e., the idea that different languages and cultures embody particular points of view). The text-based Boasian framework prioritizes the study of language on its own terms and within its wider cultural context, and in so doing gestures to a more collaborative relationship among community outsiders and insiders in producing research. It also builds on and moves the philological approach of the study of culture through language and texts forward with its concern with questions of point of view. Within this framework, we understand the Boasian emphasis on texts to necessarily include a wide range of discourse types, from everyday conversation to the more stylized speech forms that are more clearly labeled as verbal art. Boas himself expressed frustration at the constraints that the recording technology of his day imposed on the recording of more spontaneous discourse, which as we explore below is an important component of a holistic perspective on a language and its speakers, and includes artistic and playful elements that preclude a clear division between verbal art and other speech forms.
In what follows, we retrace the Boasian philological tradition in the study of Native American texts and its place in a broadly conceived anthropology and linguistics. We then chronicle, very briefly, the reach of Boasian approaches to texts among Americanist anthropologists and linguists in the years following Boas, including the engagement with speech play and verbal art; and we chronicle the rise of new Boasian movements. While a concern with natural discourse has been a part of some linguistic and linguistic anthropological endeavors over the past several decades, the actual documentation of such forms has not kept pace until recently, as new trends in language documentation, fueled by the concerns of native communities, renewed the commitment to the study of language in use, informed by many different disciplinary threads.
Our Boasian retrospect thus brings us finally to prospect—what we see as a fruitful trajectory for the investigation of language and culture, in which language documentation, linguistics, linguistic anthropology, and community priorities enter into a more richly collaborative engagement. We envision this trajectory as fundamentally grounded in the holistic “humanities of speaking” approach we advocate here—an approach that draws crucially from the Boasian project, while also correcting its limits and carrying it forward. This humanities of speaking melds scientifically and humanistically informed perspectives, paying attention to poetic and other verbally artistic forms and to the delight and appreciation of such forms—and, more broadly, to texts within their cultural context.
2. The Boasian stance and texts
A focus on texts was at the core of the Boasian project. In his 1905 address to a joint meeting of the American Anthropological Association and the American Philological Association, Boas argued:
According to the canons of philological research, would not the investigator who is not able to read the classics be barred from the number of serious students?… Still, this is the position which has confronted anthropology up to the present time. There are very few students who have taken the time and who have considered it necessary to familiarize themselves sufficiently with native languages to understand directly what the people whom they study speak about, what they think, and what they do. There are fewer still who have deemed it worth the while to record the customs and beliefs and the traditions of the people in their own words, thus giving us the objective material which will stand the scrutiny of painstaking investigation. we think it is obvious that in this respect anthropologists have everything to learn from you; that until we acquire the habit of demanding such authenticity of our reports as can be guaranteed only by philological accuracy of the record, we can hope to accumulate material that will be a safe guide to future studies. (Boas 1906, cited in Silverstein 2015:120–21)
2.1. Boas’s philological roots
Boas’s perspective had roots in a Humboldtian “anthropological philology” (Hymes 1981), understanding “philology” as the underpinning of much of today’s humanities, including anthropology and linguistics (Turner 2014). This philological perspective was deeply woven into the intellectual fabric of the day and provided an important point of departure as the serious study of Native American language and culture got underway. Among Boas’s immediate predecessors, for example, was Daniel Garrison Brinton—the first professor of anthropology in the United States—who devoted a great deal of work to Native American languages and poetry, and clearly linked anthropology, linguistics, and philology (Brinton 1890) (see Darnell 1988 and Turner 2014:344, 355); Brinton, like Boas, argued for the publishing of Native American language texts, and both were particularly fascinated by patterns of repetition in Native American verbal art (Brinton 1883 and Clements 1996). While much of Boas’s early work on Americanist linguistics was a reaction against Brinton’s evolutionary views (Stocking 1992), Boas certainly did not reject the philological basis of Brinton’s anthropology.
Boas’s own focus on texts developed over the course of his early fieldwork with Canadian Inuit (1883–84) and his subsequent consultation with the philologist and Greenlandic-folklore specialist Hinrich Rink (Silverstein 2015:108–12). Rink’s influence on Boas’s philological technique included the use of interlinear textual analysis as a basis for approaching grammar and ethnology. By this time, as Silverstein (2015:113) demonstrates, “in matters linguistic, Boas the empirical, inductive scientist of language and culture had moved into the workspace of philologists of texts.”
Importantly, Boas’s textual philology united grammar with the rest of ethnology. In doing so, he saw a central role for verbal art and speech play, in which linguistic forms are clearly manipulated for cultural purposes. In his “Introductory” to IJAL, Boas (1917) laid out the need for a linguistics journal to engage with Native American verbal art:
The problems treated in a linguistic journal must include also the literary forms of native production. Indian oratory has long been famous, but the number of recorded speeches from which we can judge their oratorical devices is exceedingly small. There is no doubt whatever that definite stylistic forms exist that are utilized to impress the hearer; but we do not know what they are. As yet, nobody has attempted a careful analysis of the style of narrative art as practised by the various tribes. The crudeness of most records presents a serious obstacle for this study, which, however, should be taken up seriously. We can study the general structure of the narrative, the style of composition, of motives, their character and sequence; but the formal stylistic devices for obtaining effects are not so easily determined. (Boas 1917:7)
Something of the on-the-ground complexities of Boas’s philological and textualizing practices can be discerned from a brief look at his work with his long-time collaborator George Hunt on “Kwakiutl” (Kwak’wala) (see, e.g., Berman 1992; 1994; 1996 and Bauman and Briggs 2003). The texts that Hunt provided Boas were often composed by Hunt in Kwak’wala and were not taken down from dictation, rather they were Hunt’s retellings and reportings. Here it is well to note that while “anthropological linguistics” was often conceived as the study “of the languages of peoples who have no writing” (Hoijer 1961:110), Boas’s own methods, grounded in the philological tradition, often stood well beyond that conception and thus moved away from a dichotomy between “oral” and “literate.” Boas was concerned with “literary forms of native production” regardless of the medium of composition or expression. While Hunt presented texts in Kwak’wala, Hunt often replied to queries by Boas in a locally inflected English, yet those responses were not published (Bauman and Briggs 2003:279). As Bauman and Briggs (2003:279) note, this leaves the impression, intentional or not, of monolingualism in Kwak’wala. Boas also often elided or altered the identity of Hunt (Berman 1994; 1996 and Bauman and Briggs 2003). While this elision was in keeping with European folklore traditions and their disinterest in individual authorship, the altering of Hunt’s identity was often done in the service of traditionalizing him (Bauman and Briggs 2003). These two trends in Boas’s work, elision of authors and narrators and a tacit assumption of monolingualism, combined in making the texts that Boas (or his collaborators) documented exemplars of a culture (Bauman and Briggs 2003:281). As Bauman and Briggs (2003:281) argue, “making the texts function in this manner entailed systematically decontextualizing them from specific contexts of production and reception in order to make them represent the unfolding of a collective unconscious that seemed purely traditional.” In what follows, we both honor Boas’s contributions and acknowledge the problematic aspects of his legacy.
2.2. Ethnology, multi-perspectivalism, and fundamental ethnic ideas
For Boas, ethnology emphasized the comparative study of native perception and intellectual life (Darnell 1998), and nothing was more important than language in its pursuit (Jakobson 1944). Boas was concerned not only with the configuration of language within a particular cultural and historical context; he was equally concerned with certain “general characteristics of articulate speech” (Boas 1911b:27)—i.e., axioms relating to the design features of grammars. It is exactly this combination of concerns—the contextual and the general—that constitute what we now call linguistic relativism or linguistic multi-perspectivalism, that is, shifting points of view (see Leavitt 2011). As Boas (1911b:26) famously suggests, “Thus it happens that each language, from the point of view of another language, may be arbitrary in its classifications; that what appears as a single simple idea in one language may be characterized by a series of distinct phonetic groups in another.” There is a felt iconicity in linguistic form—signs and categories come to feel necessary and non-arbitrary, or as Friedrich (1979:40) puts it, to feel “consubstantial” (see also Köhler 1929 and Webster 2009; 2015)—a point that Boas develops in his early paper on “alternating sounds” (1889). This concern with point of view informs Boas’s (1911b:70) interest in “fundamental ethnic ideas” and the importance of language in such investigations, and is one of Boas’s most perduring—if often misunderstood—insights:
It seems necessary to dwell upon the analogy of ethnology and language in this respect, because, if we adopt this point of view, language seems to be one of the most instructive fields of inquiry in an investigation of the formation of the fundamental ethnic ideas. The great advantage that linguistics offer in this respect is the fact that, on the whole, the categories which are formed always remain unconscious, and that for this reason the processes which lead to their formation can be followed without the misleading and disturbing factors of secondary explanations, which are so common in ethnology, so much so that they generally obscure the real history of the development of the ideas entirely. (Boas 1911b:70–71)
Thus it appears that from practical, as well as from theoretical, points of view, the study of language must be considered as one of the most important branches of ethnological study, because, on the one hand, a thorough insight into ethnology can not be gained without practical knowledge of language, and, on the other hand, the fundamental concepts illustrated by human languages are not distinct in kind from ethnological phenomena; and because, furthermore, the peculiar characteristics of languages are clearly reflected in the views and customs of the peoples of the world. (Boas 1911b:73)
In his framing of Boas’s stance, Leavitt (2011) argues that Boas and his students are more than mere descendants of the philological tradition. Rather, in attempting to grapple with the fact of linguistic diversity and the implications of linguistic relativity, they took up a pluralist position. Boas held that “a difference in language, like one in position and velocity, implies a difference in point of view that must be taken into account” (Leavitt 2011:11)—that is, languages are both shared as a human phenomenon and particular in their configurations.
We conclude this section by summarizing key Boasian themes. First, there is the fundamental role of texts in the Boasian project: One starts with texts and the privileging of language and builds from there, rather than imposing a Latin-style view of grammar on indigenous languages. Second, grammars emerge from texts. Boas (1911b) provides a general architecture for grammar, for what language is—this architecture is minimalistic, laying out principles for what he saw as essential while leaving room for the emergence of language differences. Third, language exists within wider cultural contexts; thus there is no division drawn between langue and parole, and the study of culture is itself enabled by language and texts. Fourth, as noted above, texts provide insight into “literary forms of native production” and style; verbal art is thus central to the Boasian project. Finally, indigenous perspectives are privileged in both the focus on texts and the contributions of indigenous scholars, such as William Jones, George Hunt, and Ella Deloria.
3. The persistence of Boasian text publication and text-centered study
We now consider the reach and influence of Boas’s approach to textual documentation and textual study for the indigenous languages of the Americas, emphasizing especially those aspects of textual work involving literature, style, speech play, and verbal art. In this section, we consider the kinds of projects he promoted that were centered on the publication of annotated and translated texts; then in 4, we turn to intellectual movements that extended Boasian thinking—what we term Boasian-beyond-Boas movements.
We limit our consideration to Boas’s influence on the study of texts in their original languages, since that was a central part of Boas’s vision. This perspective steers us mainly toward work of anthropologists, linguists, and linguistic anthropologists, but occasionally work of musicologists, areal specialists, and historians. We also consider how Boasian approaches fit (or failed to fit) prevailing trends in anthropology and linguistics.
As noted, Boas’s texts were transcribed from dictation or were written directly by native speakers. The bulk of the texts he published were narratives, including myths and ethnographic and personal accounts, but he also published fixed texts such as songs and prayers (e.g., Boas 1930). On the other hand, he was not able to record extemporaneous conversation or oratory, complaining that “[o]n the whole, … the available material gives a one-sided presentation of linguistic data, because we have hardly any records of daily occurrences, every-day conversation, descriptions of industries, customs, and the like” (Boas 1917:2).
Boas’s own text presentations appeared in grammatical sketches, articles, and multi-volume monographs and books. They were sometimes just paragraphs of original text with corresponding paragraphs of free translation and no further philological apparatus (e.g., Boas 1930); sometimes they included interlinear translations for each word (e.g., in his grammar sketches in Boas 1911a); sometimes only morphological analysis and lexical discussion keyed to each word, e.g., “A Keresan text” (Boas 1923, with no word-level or free translation at all); and sometimes a grand suite of all these modes of annotation, e.g., “A Chehalis text” (Boas 1935a; edited and retranscribed as the first part of Kinkade 1984, where it is given an ethnopoetic representation).
Boas saw texts as being at the center of “ethnological” inquiry and as having multiple purposes, yet his text publications sometimes were more culturally oriented, such as his Kwakiutl religion corpus (Boas 1930); sometimes were illustrations for grammars as in his Handbook sketches (Boas 1911a); and sometimes the text itself drove the grammatical description, as in the Chehalis text just mentioned.
This Boasian configuration or paradigm—producing analyzed, annotated texts and text-based analyses whose purpose could be ethnographic, humanistic, linguistic, or a combination—persisted through the twentieth century in Americanist practice; but at the same time, it moved slowly out of the disciplinary limelights of anthropology and of the emerging discipline of linguistics. In anthropology, interest in working with original language texts waned; while in linguistics, texts receded as ends in themselves as the focus turned to grammatical structure and knowledge (and to systems for discovering or representing it), and turned away from language use, verbal art, and performance. All of this tended to narrow the uses to which texts were put; to codify their presentation depending on use; and to subordinate texts to grammars.
A way to gauge the persistence of the Boasian paradigm among Americanist language scholars—as well as certain changes over time—is to track the publication of texts and text-based analyses in IJAL from its inception in 1917 until 1970, a point at which text publication drops off or yields to the disciplinary developments we discuss in 4 below. In this period, nearly every volume (if not every issue) contained at least one text-oriented article, most several.2 Across this corpus, we find persistence as well as some change on such key issues as what to document and present as text; how to present, annotate, and translate texts; and how texts are to be studied and used. We take up each of these dimensions in turn.
3.1. What to document
Over the whole period, most texts that were presented were myths or folktales (e.g., Prince 1917, Boas 1923, Sapir 1924, Harrington 1930, Boas 1935a, Henry 1935, Pike 1944, LaBarre 1950, Wallace and Reyburn 1951, Salzmann 1956, Powlison 1965, and nearly 20 more). Also over the whole period, there was a smattering of historical narratives (Swanton 1921, Pike 1946, Garvin 1953, Kennard 1963, and Jacobs 1968). Early on, there were a few prayers, indigenous (Mason 1918) or Christian (de Créqui-Montfort and Rivet 1920), but then they stopped. Later, other kinds of texts began appearing, including humorous tales (Pike 1945a; 1945b; 1946), personal or directly experienced narratives (Speck 1946, Voegelin 1952, and Matthews and Red Thunder Cloud 1967), songs (Stone 1947), how-to and how-we-lived texts (Wolff 1951, Gudschinsky 1958, and Li 1964), laws (Yegerlehner 1954), and conversations (Garvin 1954 and Deloria 1954). The works show increased attention to daily social life and individual experience and creativity; and they show a gradual shift from dictation toward audio recording as the basis of transcription.
3.2. How to present, annotate, and translate texts
A second site of persistence of Boasian practice, as well as some evolution, was the manner in which texts were treated philologically—how they were transcribed, glossed, translated, and analyzed. Throughout the whole period examined, some were simply presented in sentences or paragraphs of transcription matched to sentences or paragraphs of free translation and nothing else (e.g., Goddard 1923, Voegelin 1945, Deloria 1954, Salzmann 1956, and Jacobs 1968, among others); or with word-by-word interlinear (or corresponding) glossing, in a few cases without any supporting free translations (de Créqui-Montfort and Rivet 1920 and Garvin 1953) but usually with them (e.g., Speck 1918, Harrington 1930, LaBarre 1950, and Kennard 1963, among others).3
Also throughout the whole period examined, texts were presented with morphological analyses, usually alongside word-level glossing and free translation. In the earlier part of the period, these took the form of a footnote or endnote linked to each word, discursively giving its lexical composition and derivational and inflectional characteristics, e.g., Prince (1917), Boas (1923; 1935a), Trager (1945), and—perhaps in its most masterful form—Sapir’s (1924) presentation of a Nitinat myth The Rival Whalers, where the grammar itself slowly unfolds from footnote to footnote alongside the analysis of the word in question. Ten years later [Haas] Swadesh and Swadesh (1933) present a second Nitinat text in a similar way but, before getting down to the word-by-word analysis, they first clear the way with an autonomous précis of the grammar on which to base it, achieving—in part at least—a more standard complementarity between text and grammar (note also Swanton 1921). Likewise, Henry (1935) presents a Kaingang myth in a similar fashion but also offers syntactic analyses in his footnotes.
The discursive presentation of morphological analysis fades toward the latter part of the period examined (although Li 1964 is a holdout) as contributions begin to appear in which words are segmented into formatives that are linked to corresponding formative glosses, perhaps a move toward newly fashionable item-and-arrangement views of morphology (Hockett 1956), and away from the item-and-process and word-and-paradigm mix of Boas’s and Sapir’s footnotes. This appears first in Pike’s (1944) brilliantly sophisticated treatment of apparent prefixation and suffixation in a Mixteco text and in Wonderly (1952) and Garvin (1954), which cite component morphemes using just their index numbers in a corresponding grammar; or, more readably, where segmentations and glosses are next to each other in paragraph format (e.g., Winter 1966). However, apart from Pike (1944), the modern Leipzig glossing rules format (see Comrie, Haspelmath, and Bickel 2008), where texts are presented in three or more lines of segmentation, gloss, and word or free translation is nearly absent before the 1970s, after which it emerges systematically in, e.g., Mithun and Woodbury (1980) and other IJAL Native American Text Series volumes.
3.3. The purpose of texts
The different (and evolving) ideas of what texts should be recorded and documented, and of how to present them, can be understood in light of the purposes to which texts were put. As noted, Boas’s central idea is that texts are a source of primary “ethnological” information; a basis for grammatical discovery; “literary forms of native production” or style; and perhaps above all, all of these at once, as the fundamental corpus of a general philology of culture.
3.3.1. Texts as “ethnology”
It is notable that few IJAL text presentations in the period being considered have extensive “ethnological” commentary (exceptions include Wallace and Reyburn 1951, Deloria 1954, Matthews and Red Thunder Cloud 1967, and Jacobs 1968). But beyond IJAL, there have continued to be significant philological presentations of early-attested as well as linguist-recorded text corpora providing extensive historical and ethnological exegeses (e.g., Bergsland 1959, Goddard and Bragdon 1989, and Woodbury 1992). Notably Boasian is Mather (1985), a 228-page ethnography of Yup’ik ceremonialism written in Yup’ik only, that weaves into its narrative long text passages from Yup’ik elders that the author recorded and transcribed. And in this same period, collections of texts emerged that were associated with grammars and that carefully sampled different genres of speech, including classically Boasian ethnographically oriented narratives (e.g., Bright 1957, Shipley 1965, and others issued by the University of California Publications in Linguistics series in mid-century).
3.3.2. Texts and grammatical discovery
About a third of IJAL text presentations in the period under discussion—almost all of them pre-World War II—included presentations of a grammatical sketch, or parts of one, alongside the text and suggested an interrelationship where grammar illuminated text or text analysis, and text illuminated grammar. In some cases, for example, in Sapir (1924) and Boas (1935a), as already noted, the text might come first as the grammar was meted out afterward in analytic notes, where it served as annotation for the text (see also Pike 1944). But Boas also saw the relationship going the other way, with a free-standing grammar coming first, followed by a text at the end serving as an appendix to illustrate the grammar, as in his own sketches in the Handbook of American Indian Languages (Boas 1911a). This approach was present from the start (e.g., de Créqui-Montfort and Rivet 1920, Swanton 1921, de Angulo and Freeland 1931, and Winter 1966), and it dovetailed with the emerging structuralist (and eventually generative) focus on representations of language structure as the final goal: for example, Samarin (1967:46) calls for grammars to be accompanied only by “enough texts to permit a verification of the analysis,” an idea that narrowed Boasian motivation for collecting and publishing texts, and solidified the grammar as a freestanding entity, to which texts are subordinated.
Indeed, it became the norm in the postwar period to publish articles on grammar and sometimes whole grammars without associated texts, although a conspicuous holdout was the series of so-called Boasian trilogies of grammar, texts, and dictionary that resulted mostly from the mid-century doctoral dissertations of students of Mary R. Haas, published by the University of California Publications in Linguistics. Likewise, from the vantage point of grammar writing, Hill (2006:609) lists, among ways that a linguist might “write culture in grammar,” the use of “[e]xample words, constructions, and sentences in the grammar [that] implicitly reflect culturally-appropriate usage … because they were drawn from a corpus of texts.” She concludes that while Boas, Sapir, and other earlier-period writers did just this, that—in spite of notable examples to the contrary—“there is an increasing tendency in American grammars to favor the transparent representation of grammatical phenomena over the cultural interest of the example sentences,” implying as well a lesser reliance on textual attestations as examples. In all, it is fair to say that in the domain of texts and grammar, the Boasian paradigm both persisted and faded.
3.3.3. Texts and style, language use, speech play, and verbal artistry
Boas’s interest in these dimensions of texts, including, “the literary forms of native production,” persists to a moderate degree in IJAL articles over the period under consideration and later seeds subsequent Boasian movements. Many presentations of texts offer commentary on story types or textual genres (e.g., Prince 1917, Speck 1918, LaBarre 1950, Wolff 1951, and Wonderly 1952), or offer significant cultural exegeses (e.g., Deloria 1954); and one article is a summary consideration of ethnolinguistic lessons from a collection of Kalapuya texts (Rumberger 1949), standing apart from the separately published text volume (Jacobs, Frachtenberg, and Gatschet 1945). Finally, late in the period being considered, there appear analyses of discourse structure (Gudschinsky 1958 and Powlison 1965), which continue the focus on the broad features of texts but in terms of emerging preoccupations with structure and its relationship to discourse meaning.
Of particular interest are studies of features of indexicality (Silverstein 1976)—variability in linguistic form and language use as a way of responding to and acting expressively within different social and cultural contexts. These begin with Frachtenberg’s (1920) extension to Quileute of Sapir’s (1915) notion of “abnormal” types of speech, where phonological and morphological distortions function as indexes for different categories of social abnormality, and they continue with Sapir’s (1929b) consideration of Nootka baby words, Lee’s (1946) discussion of stylistic negation in Wintu, and four papers from an IJAL issue dedicated to the 100th anniversary of Boas’s birth: French (1958) on formal speech in Chinookan, Hymes (1958) on the language of Chinookan myth, and two articles on features of Tewa singing (Dozier 1958 and Yegerlehner 1958). All of the articles just cited are (like Sapir 1915) discussions drawing examples from texts but not actually presenting any one text; but two later articles use specific texts to explore the use of English loans in Hopi (Kennard 1963) and the line-by-line play of stylistic elements in a Galice text (Jacobs 1968).
Also notable is a focus on individual linguistic cleverness, a departure from Boas. It arises first in a remarkable quartet of Mixteco text presentations by Kenneth Pike (1945a; 1945b; 1946; 1947), which hinge on intra- and interlinguistic double entendres arising among words differing only in tone, and due to words in Mixteco being given tone patterns that speakers associate with Spanish. Somewhat later, another genre begins to appear based on mini-texts as examples, including Upson (1956) on (Yaitepec) Chatino riddles such as ndsuʔwi kuwēʔ tukē. seʔ4 “‘The cave has a pig in it’. meaning the tongue” (1956:114); Dundes (1964) on Choctaw tongue twisters and Creek word plays; and Rigsby (1970) on Gitksan tongue twisters, riddles, and puns.
3.4. Disciplinary contexts
We can conclude our discussion with a consideration of the disciplinary contexts in which Boasian text-based research persisted among Americanists, even as it gradually moved out of the disciplinary limelight of anthropology and of the emerging field of linguistics.
In anthropology, interest in working with original language texts waned. Contrast Boas’s text-centered view with what often became a division of labor between anthropological linguists and cultural anthropologists in the 1930s and later. To take one example, Morris Opler and Harry Hoijer worked at the same time on the Mescalero Apache Reservation, documenting Chiricahua Apache narrative traditions in the 1930s. Opler’s (1942) Myths and Tales of the Chiricahua Apache Indians is a set of English-language texts, with the occasional Chiricahua Apache word. Opler does not indicate which texts were told as English-language texts or which were interpretations from Chiricahua Apache narratives; nor does he indicate who told which texts. If Chiricahua Apache narratives were told and then translated into English by an interpreter, the Chiricahua Apache versions were not documented by Opler. Opler was interested in the content of the narratives regardless of the language; the English translations were enough for his purposes. Opler’s work can be contrasted with Hoijer’s (1938) documentation of a series of texts, this time in Chiricahua Apache, and with an indication of who told the narrative. Hoijer provides an English translation and a set of notes about the Chiricahua Apache versions, together with a grammatical sketch of the Apache language. Hoijer was principally interested in what the texts revealed about the Chiricahua Apache language—but not in the poetics of Chiricahua Apache. However, his native-language documentation made subsequent analysis of the ethnopoetic structuring devices possible (see Webster 1999). There was, essentially, a division of labor: Hoijer documented the language, while Opler documented the culture.
In linguistics, although Boasian text-centric work persisted among Americanists, it became increasingly isolated as the discipline changed. Even in the practice of later Boasians, texts were subordinated to grammars, and phonemic analyses came to replace the more continuously variable phonetic textual representations of earlier Boasian practice, subtly constraining the linguist’s ability to represent the stylistic and expressive variability in texts. Nevertheless, influenced in part by Boas, figures in linguistics from Sapir (1921) to Jakobson (1960) continued to to advocate for the study of literature and poetry within a broadly conceived linguistics.
4. Boasian-beyond-Boas movements
We now turn to the rise in the late twentieth century, due in considerable measure to the work of Americanists, of what we call Boasian-beyond-Boas movements. We begin by reviewing movements that have their strongest roots in anthropologically oriented approaches to the study of texts, encompassing style, language use, speech play, and verbal artistry. We then consider movements arising within linguistics.
4.1. Movements rooted in anthropologically oriented approaches to the study of texts
We consider here four movements, all rooted in Boas: the ethnography of communication or speaking; ethnopoetics; linguistic relativity as argued via poetics and the individual imagination; and the discourse-centered approach to language and culture. Collectively, they have been key forces in the formation of linguistic anthropology.
4.1.1. Ethnography of communication/speaking
In the 1960s, Hymes and John Gumperz initiated a research agenda known as the “ethnography of speaking” (later, the ethnography of communication). Hymes (1962) explicitly linked the perspective with the works of Boas (1911b), Edward Sapir (1929a), and Benjamin Lee Whorf (1956). Taking his cue from Whorf’s “fashions of speaking,” Hymes (1962:191) states that, “the ethnography of speaking is concerned with the situations and uses, the patterns and functions, of speaking as an activity in its own right.” Much of the focus of the ethnography of speaking was on verbally artistic ways of speaking (see Bauman and Sherzer 1974 and Sherzer 1983). Yet for all its emphasis on ways of speaking, ethnographers of speaking often came up short when it came to recording, archiving, and presenting actual instances of speech, artistic or otherwise; in that sense, it arose within the documentary dry-period between Boas and the recent revitalization of language documentation. One line of research that developed out of a concern with the ethnography of speaking was a concern with performance and verbal art as performance (see Hymes 1981:chap. 3 and Bauman 1984).
4.1.2. Ethnopoetics
Ethnopoetics, the attempt to understand and represent the poetic structuring of indigenous verbal art on its own terms, arose within Americanist linguistics and in the Boasian tradition. The notion took many forms in practice. Melville Jacobs pioneered the understanding of narratives as dramatic performance (Jacobs 1959). Dennis Tedlock offered representations on the printed page of dramatic aspects of audio-recorded verbal performance (Tedlock 1972; 1983), followed by Kinkade (1987) and others. Dell Hymes (1981; 1987; 2003), in contrast, returned to the texts documented by the Boasians, making line-and-verse poetic textual representation using the parallelism of form and content an idea with roots in Boas’s concern for pattern, as well as Jakobson’s (1960) work in linguistic poetics. Hymes (2003) and others (Berman 1992, Silverstein 1996, and Webster 1999) have shown that attention to the context of elicitation may reveal something of the interactional moment between narrator and text-collector. Hymes’s (1981) emphasis, in his own ethnopoetic work, on attributing narratives to specific individuals (Victoria Howard, Louis Simpson, or Charles Cultee) is an attempt to acknowledge the verbal artistry of specific narrators.
Ethnopoetics also encouraged anthropologists and linguists to attend to linguistic features that were not always at the forefront of linguistic theory (from expressive devices to metaphor to ideophony). In 1981, it was possible for Hymes (1981:342) to argue that, “it is hard to point to an example of reading a Native American text in the Native American language for interpretation dependent on features of the language.” Subsequent ethnopoetic research has attempted to correct this gap (see, e.g., Sherzer 1987, Egesdal 1992, Woodbury 1993; 1998, Bunte 2002, Kroskrity 2010, Mitchell and Webster 2011, and Kimball 2013). For all its focus on poetic structuring and how to represent narratives on the page, there was often little explicit discussion of the aesthetic sensibilities that informed such practices in ethnopoetics. Likewise, as Donald Bahr (1986:171) noted, “ethnopoetics should be more than the study of technique … it should include meaning and use.”
4.1.3. Friedrich’s poetics and the individual imagination
Paul Friedrich (1979; 1986) went well beyond Boas’s interest in texts as a window on collective mental life by calling for a focus on poetic language in terms of the imaginative individual and by defining linguistic relativity in those terms. He notes (1986:53), “poetic language is the locus of the most interesting differences between languages and should be studied together with the poetic imagination of the individual. The open, energizing interaction between two phenomena—the individual and the linguistic—is at the heart of the general [linguistic relativity] hypothesis.” Friedrich (1986:46–53) develops this forcefully in his discussion of the interweaving of evocations of Tarascan (Purépecha) shape classifier suffixes (often with body-part associations) and their use in narratives and in everyday conversations. These “networks of association” in “Tarascan spatial symbolism” are specific to Tarascan and thus highlight the interplay of a common linguistic feature (shape classifiers) with the particularities of its use in practice (Friedrich 1986:49). And, as he notes (1986:47), there is pleasure and appreciation in the use of the shape classifiers: “the long words that include a spatial (usually body-part) suffix are drawn out slowly by the raconteur. They often anchor and/or conclude the narrative line. They are awaited by the listener, often triggering smiles or laughter, and are often repeated in isolation when the story is over.” This approach has been widely influential (e.g., Mannheim 1986 and Webster 2015) and it greatly broadens the humanities of speaking envisioned by Boas.
4.1.4. Sherzer’s discourse-centered approach
Building on both Boas and the ethnography of speaking, Joel Sherzer proposes a discourse-centered approach to language and culture, arguing (1987:306) that “it is in certain kinds of discourse, in which speech play and verbal art are heightened, as central moments in poetry, magic, politics, religion, respect, insult, and bargaining, that the language-culture-discourse relationship comes into sharpest focus and the organizing role of discourse in this relationship is highlighted” (see also Urban 1991:1). Discourse, especially verbally artistic discourse, is at the center of the “language-culture-society-individual nexus” (Sherzer 1987:302). It follows that, if “discourse is an embodiment, a filter, a creator and recreator, and a transmitter of culture, then in order to study culture we must study actual forms of discourse” (Sherzer 1987:306). Much work using this approach has provided ample records and transcripts of actually occurring discourse that attends to the speech play, poetic and verbal artistry within it (Sherzer and Urban 1986, Sherzer and Woodbury 1987, E. Basso 1990, Sherzer 1990, and Valentine 1995).
4.2. Movements rooted in linguistics
4.2.1. Generative and other grammatical frameworks
Several Boasian themes have been revived and remade as grammar has increasingly been pursued within comprehensive, often competing, theoretical linguistic frameworks. Generative linguistics, the most long-standing of these, has in some respects seemed counter-Boasian by focusing mainly on individuals’ internal knowledge of and capacity for grammar, rather than on their manifestation as specific texts in specific languages (Chomsky 1986:1–50). Nevertheless, it has fostered several Boasian themes. First, by aiming to characterize linguistic capacity at a species-wide level, it has stimulated corollary formulations of linguistic variability (e.g., Baker 1996) and, in so doing, revived consciousness of the trade-off between the universal and particular that Boas himself articulated clearly with respect to language and “fundamental ethnic ideas”:
Judging the importance of linguistic studies from this point of view, it seems well worthwhile to subject the whole range of linguistic concepts to a searching analysis, and to seek in the peculiarities of the grouping of ideas in different languages an important characteristic in the history of the mental development of the various branches of mankind. From this point of view, the occurrence of the most fundamental grammatical concepts in all languages must be considered as proof of the unity of fundamental psychological processes. (Boas 1911b:71)
The generative focus on the knowledge and capacity of speakers was also at the core of arguments for training native speakers in linguistics (e.g., Hale 1976), reviving Boas’s own efforts in that area at a time when almost no work on indigenous American languages was being conducted by native speakers, and yet community concern over language shift was mounting.
To be sure, generative grammarians tended to emphasize non-textual methods, including the study of grammaticality judgments about constructed examples, translation-elicitation, and other forms of experimentation. Nevertheless, the practices of fieldworkers with a generative orientation have included textual study (Davis, Gillon, and Matthewson 2014), and there is a significant generative tradition of studying patterns in poetic texts (Halle and Keyser 1966 and Kiparsky 1973, among others) as well as in play languages (e.g., Sherzer 1970 and Campbell 1974) in order to access categories and capacities posited for mental grammars.
Meanwhile, linguists pursuing functional and other usage-oriented frameworks studied texts not only to find or illustrate grammatical patterns but also to link such patterns to meaning or discourse function (e.g., Labov and Waletzky 1967, Chafe 1970, Hopper and Thompson 1980, and Givón 1983). This in turn led to ideas about the relationship between language use and the historical emergence of grammatical categories and patterns (e.g., Silverstein 1985 and Hopper and Traugott 2001). This work also expands on Boas’s conjecture— implicit in the quotation just cited—that linguistic categories take their shape historically in the context of habitual thought and language use.
4.2.2. Documentary linguistics
A quite different movement that emerged mainly within linguistics in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s is documentary linguistics, centered on language documentation. This movement, characterized as “an ambitious rewelding of the splintered pieces of the Boasian framework for languages study” (Woodbury 2011:170), embodies some of the clearest “Boasian-beyond-Boas” initiatives. As formulated by Himmelmann (1998:9), language documentation is distinct from descriptive (or theoretical) linguistics, even if potentially associated with those enterprises, and its aim is “the record of the linguistic practices and traditions of a speech community”— an essentially Boasian textual agenda, as we explore below. It also includes the data records that arise from field research—including elicitation and experimentation—such as data sets, protocols, and the like.
Documentary linguistics arose in the context of heightened concern over “language endangerment,” that is, shifts, often radical, in the ecology of speaking, including the fall into disuse of ancestral lexico-grammatical codes among the only people who knew them. This concern developed among activist community members themselves as well as outside linguists (Alvarez and Hale 1970, Hale 1992, Wilkins 1992, and Woodbury 2011:67–70). At the same time, the technology for language documentation grew by leaps and bounds, making it possible to create digital audio and video materials and establish large-scale archives to store them. These trends, alongside growing theoretical interest in linguistic diversity and typology in the context of many competing frameworks, and a revaluing of corpus-based grammatical discovery (Heath 1985), provided fundamental impetus to the development of the contemporary documentary enterprise.
5. From retrospect to prospect
The early legacy of Boasian work, together with the many not-fully-interconnected Boasian-beyond-Boas movements just reviewed, represent enormous potentialities as well as challenges. We turn now to the importance of this legacy for contemporary approaches to working with texts.
As we noted above, the Boasian legacy is visible in a range of recent anthropological and linguistic movements. It is perhaps clearest in the emergent field of language documentation, which emphasizes a direct engagement with community voices, both through the particular languages they speak and through the perspectives and priorities they express. Nevertheless, the convergences among these parallel endeavors have tended to be inadequately acknowledged. While linguists are disposed (and equipped) to engage with community concerns about language shift, they have often framed text collection as a problem of sampling rather than also being one of ethnography; meanwhile, anthropologists have expressed (reasonable) skepticism over formulations of “language endangerment” and of community (e.g., Silverstein 1998) and have generally come later to digital archiving.
The field of language documentation has opened up new opportunities for dialogue between linguists and anthropologists, and for a Boasian holism that views language within its cultural context and vice versa. The urgency and importance of such a dialogue has been eloquently voiced by Lise Dobrin, particularly in the context of language endangerment and shift (see also Epps and Stenzel 2013), who calls on documentary linguists to actively engage themselves in “culturally particular local systems of meaning” (2008:317). Dobrin observes that “The ideological stances that bear on language may be grounded in implicit cultural assumptions that are not necessarily focused on language as such, but instead on more fundamental notions about how the social world works… . Endangered-language linguistics should concern itself not only with language ideologies, but with the full range of cultural ideas that may lead people who value their languages to nevertheless act in ways that diminish their use” (Dobrin 2014:126).
In what follows, we echo Dobrin’s call for a more dedicated engagement between the study of language and the study of culture. We argue that Boas’s holistic vision of language and culture, as seen primarily through the lens of textual documentation and analysis, continues to offer important insights that we can apply in shaping a productive way forward.
5.1. Contemporary documentation and the Boasian agenda
Recent years have seen a gradual but significant shift toward a more holistic approach to documentation, embracing a wide range of discursive contexts. As we outline above, this shift comes in response to a growing appreciation of the interplay of cultural and linguistic context by scholars, a focusing of attention on the priorities of native communities, and an awareness of the urgency of documentation in the face of imminent language endangerment and rapid cultural change—as well as the development of new technologies that facilitate the documentation of spontaneous discourse. In many respects, this move toward a holistic documentation involves a re-engagement with core Boasian principles—that is, an emphasis on understanding a language in its own terms and within a wider cultural context, as a way to gain insight into “fundamental ethnic ideas” (Boas 1911b:70) and with a particularist’s appreciation of variability. At the same time, the field is exploring how these fundamental Boasian perspectives may be moved forward, elaborated, and refined. In this section, we focus on the Boasian foundation evident in contemporary documentary linguistic initiatives and its relevance to current questions such as: What should be documented? How is documentation best carried out, and what are its essential goals? What is understood by “comprehensive” documentation? Who will, could, or should benefit from the enterprise?
As we reviewed in 3 above, Boas’s call for “large masses of texts” (1917:1) in indigenous American languages set the stage for a valorization of texts in linguistic research. This impetus proceeded to wax and wane within the trajectory of linguistics as a discipline, such that the attention to philology and verbal artistry within Boas’s larger agenda (see, e.g., Boas 1927) became obscured by a narrower focus on texts as relevant only insofar as they inform linguistic analysis. However, the growth of language documentation as a sub-field has seen a return to an appreciation of texts in their own right. For example, Mosel (2006:53) argues that a relegation of texts to marginal appendixes of a grammatical description is not justifiable even for the grammarian, who has a responsibility not only to provide detailed evidence for his/her claims but also to provide material that may inform new discoveries by future grammarians and theoreticians. Boas’s emphasis on texts as a means of allowing native points of view to emerge rather than be filtered through the biases of an observer (despite the critiques noted in 2 above) resonates closely with contemporary calls in documentary and descriptive linguistics to let the language “tell its own story” and allow speakers to “speak for themselves, creating a record of spontaneous speech in natural communicative settings” (Mithun 2001:53, cited in Evans and Dench 2006:1; see also Gil 2001 and Haspelmath 2007). Similarly, the Boasian attention to the particularities of individual languages and their implications for linguistic relativity (see 2.2 above) is refocused in recent discussions highlighting the extent of the diversity present in the world’s languages—which has become more and more evident through the documentary and descriptive initiatives of the past few decades—and the cognitive implications of this diversity (see, e.g., Tomasello 1999). While these questions draw on a history of discussion in the field regarding the extent to which language is universal or variable, the Boasian agenda in fact has had a significant hand in shaping both perspectives, as observed above. Many of the initiatives that have become foregrounded in language documentation work are likewise relevant in contemporary linguistic anthropological research, thus highlighting the potential for a more productive synergy between these disciplines.
5.2. The value of a holistic approach to documentation
At the heart of much of Boas’s agenda was the view that language and speaking taken as a whole are essentially inseparable from their wider cultural context, and that an informed understanding of one requires an awareness of the other. While subsequent academic trends moved well away from this point of view (although it resurfaced in work by Hymes, Sherzer, and others; see 4 above), it has begun to re-emerge strongly in recent work, fueled in large part by documentary initiatives and their focus on texts. A noteworthy current in these recent endeavors has emphasized the potential sensitivity of linguistic structure to cultural factors—a research program which challenges the Saussurian prioritization of language (synchronic langue) as an object of study divorced from both usage (parole) and from change over time (diachrony). Increased attention to discourse has drawn attention to the observation that “grammars do best what speakers do most” (Du Bois 1985:363), i.e., that patterns that occur frequently for pragmatic and discursive reasons are most likely to become routinized through grammaticalization—and in some cases, the prevalence of these patterns is demonstrably linked to particular sociocultural practices, perspectives, and ideologies (see, e.g., Evans and Dench 2006 and Dryer 2006). Such a perspective is well in keeping with Boas’s own approach, as Jakobson (1944:194) observes: “In Boas’ opinion the diachronic, historic approach is superimposed upon the synchronic method not only as the aim of inquiry upon its means, but likewise as the explanation upon mere description. From such a viewpoint one would scarcely understand a phenomenon without knowing ‘how it came into being’.”
We now have many examples of such cases, many drawn from documentary work on languages of the Americas and elsewhere, in which the most satisfying explanation for synchronic idiosyncrasies must make reference to both culture and diachrony. For example, Evans (2003) describes the grammaticalized kinship-related categories (“kintax”) present in many Australian languages, in which pronominal inventories and agreement patterns involving person and number marking must make reference to particular, culturally salient kin relations. Similarly, Dixon (1972) (see also Lakoff 1987) describes how the seemingly arbitrary associations of certain sets of nouns with particular nominal classes are in fact grounded in mythologically salient connections, such as that between women and birds (which are understood to embody the spirits of dead women). In addition to informing our understanding of particular languages, some links between cultural practice and linguistic structure are clearly recurrent cross-linguistically, such as mother-in-law language and formalized discourse in socially problematic contexts; as Evans and Dench (2006) observe, these patterns have much to tell us about broader trends in human language and of the possible universalist and/or functionalist motivations behind them. Examples such as these neatly illustrate Boas’s view of language as a source of insight into “fundamental ethnic ideas”—how different peoples may understand their worlds in particular ways (see 2.2 above).
A deeper understanding of the associations between cultural context and linguistic structure has important implications for our conception of language as an integral part of human experience. It leads us to consider not just why structure exists, but how speakers make use of it in their daily lives, and how it relates to their particular cultural, social, and ideological frameworks. Such a perspective underscores the relevance of linguistically informed documentation to conceptions of culture, history, and worldview. This understanding of texts as far more than just sources of linguistic information echoes Boas’s goal of establishing philological corpora, within which he envisioned grammars and dictionaries as the interpretive works and texts as the ultimate ends—in contrast to the opposing perspective noted above.
For Boas, a particular concern relating language to lived experience involved the cognitive dimension. Native-language texts provided an opportunity to understand the native point of view, as Boas observed when he wrote that “I have spared no trouble to collect descriptions of customs and beliefs in the language of the Indian, because in these the points that seem important to him are emphasized, and the almost unavoidable distortion contained in the descriptions given by the casual visitor and student is eliminated” (1909:309). This concern with the particularities of language and thought set the stage for Sapir’s and Whorf’s subsequent exploration of their association—labeled linguistic relativity—which like many other aspects of the Boasian legacy was neglected and even denigrated as the field moved on, only to re-emerge as an area of serious consideration in recent years (Leavitt 2011) (see 4 above).
For contemporary documentary linguists, texts offer unparalleled insights into the ways that people understand and express their worlds, through the intellectual, cultural, and social ontologies that are evident in discourse and in the manipulation of linguistic structure within it. For example, Woodbury’s (1993) exploration of the use of the complex Cup’ik demonstrative system in a particular narrative shows how referential categories expressing spatial distribution are indexed “on the fly” to moral and evaluative meanings, thus highlighting the relevance of linguistic structure to cultural context and expression. Work on Hup incantations (Ramos and Epps 2015) reveals a complex ontological classification of the plants, animals, and other beings within diverse environments (river course, forest, sky, water, etc.), as well as the links between the natural world and social, metaphysical, and mythical landscapes, encoded via metaphor and parallelism. Still other examples include recent investigations of speakers’ manipulation of evidentials to interpret and manage social responsibility (Aikhenvald 2004 and Michael 2008)—recalling Boas’s own observation that we would have a better time of reading newspapers if English had an evidential system (Jakobson 1944:192). As Hill (2006:622) observes, such studies that explore the intricate association between linguistic structure, discourse, and culturally particular knowledge and practice are essential if we are “to base our case for documenting and developing threatened languages largely on a claim that they and their speakers contribute irreproducible understandings to the total store of human knowledge.”
A focus on speech play and verbal art in recent work in linguistic anthropology also articulates closely with a language documentation focus on texts and displays elements of a similarly Boasian agenda. Indeed, Dobrin (2012) explicitly shows the value of attending to ethnopoetic structurings in language documentation work—to see texts not merely as sources for data but also as interactional accomplishments (see also Silverstein 1996, Webster 1999, and Kroskrity and Webster 2015). The complexities of translating verbal art have been a central concern in ethnopoetic research (Sammons and Sherzer 2000, Swann 2011, and Kozak 2012). A concern with sound—from ideophony to phonological parallelism—continues to be important in research on speech play and verbal art (see Feld et al. 2004, Nuckolls 2010, and Lahti, Barrett, and Webster 2014). Likewise, the question of voice, both as the capacity to say something in a locally meaningful and satisfying way (see Kroskrity and Webster 2015) and the muscularity and materiality of the voice (Sicoli 2010, Samuels and Porcello 2015, and Weidman 2015), can be usefully integrated into research on speech play and verbal art and questions of translation (Webster 2016). Recent linguistic anthropological engagements with texts, philology, and ways of speaking in light of language shift and/or a concern with linguistic relativity also reveal a continuing attention to a Boasian approach in contemporary linguistic anthropology (see, e.g., O’Neill 2008, Meek 2010, Perley 2011, and Nevins 2013).
Work in language documentation and linguistic anthropology alike underscore that the philological value of the texts gathered through documentary initiatives cannot be overestimated. As Boas observed (e.g., 1927), the verbal artistry of these texts is valuable both in its potential for wide aesthetic appeal (as seen, for example, in the interpretative work of Hymes and Tedlock) and also for what it tells us about cultural particularity in art and its appreciation. These considerations are evident in Boas’s discussion of how themes and events are altered in Native American versions of what were once European and Biblical stories and, for example, in a comparison of Navajo attitudes toward punning with those in other cultures.
As Sherzer (2002) and Samuels (2004) have noted, punning as an aesthetic practice is variably valorized and, indeed, may be denigrated as a low form of humor. Navajos that Webster has worked with think rather highly of punning as both a display of verbal dexterity and as an invitation for imaginative contemplation (Webster 2015:157)—whereas Samuel Johnson famously apologized for the puns in Shakespeare (see Webster 2015:161). But phonological iconicity—words sounding like other words—is a ubiquitous feature of languages (whether or not, as Sherzer [2002:151] notes, they are “actualized as puns”), both intralingually (that is, within a language) and interlingually (that is, across languages, e.g., Haas 1951 and Woolard 1998). The imaginative possibilities facilitated by puns will differ from language to language and across languages. That, for example, the contradictory nidi ‘even, but’ in Navajo can be heard as ni’di ‘on earth’ in a poem by Rex Lee Jim (Webster 2016) seems particular to Navajo. The ambiguity here works in Navajo and in particular ways.
On the other hand, some Navajos have told Webster (2010:293) that the place-name Tséyi’ ‘inside the rock’ and Disney “sound alike.” Canyon de Chelly is the more common European-American name for Tséyi’ and is now a United States National Monument (run by the National Park Service). One of Webster’s neighbors enjoyed calling the park Disney, based on the resemblance between Tséyi’ and Disney. There is social commentary in this pun. As it was explained to Webster, the pun highlights the ways that tourists approach Tséyi’—they see it as an amusement park and not as a place where Navajos still live and have sheep camps, not as an important historical and mythic place. The particular resonances work between English and Navajo; it is that resonance that can facilitate imaginative acts. The question of interlingual puns returns us to Boas’s concern with “apperception” in his “On Alternating Sounds” (1889:52). There Boas argued that the sounds of our language(s)—as a point of view or perspective—orient us to hear the sounds of different language(s) on the terms of our own language(s) instead of those of the language(s) encountered. Interlingual puns play on just that tendency. Gone are visions of hermetically sealed languages.
Still other contemporary research trends likewise highlight the continued relevance of the Boasian attention to the interrelationship of language, culture, and history. As documentary linguistics has driven an influx of new data on a wide range of the world’s languages—many from regions that until recently were only minimally represented, such as Amazonia—the field has seen a renewed interest in prehistory. With it have come new emphases on multidisciplinary investigation, with population genetics, anthropology, computer science, linguistics, and other disciplines contributing insights into questions of relationship and diffusion. For Boas himself, as Jakobson (1944:194) observes, “every social science was in the last resort a historic science: ‘Anthropology deals with the history of human society’ (1938) and the study of languages purposes ‘to unravel the history of the growth of human language’ (1920).” Discursive texts, and especially specialized forms associated with verbal art, often hold important clues to the dynamics of group interaction and the transmission of ideas over time and space—as can be seen, for example, in the distribution of genres such as ritual wailing in Amazonia (Urban 1988, Briggs 1993, and Beier, Michael, and Sherzer 2002), or mythic themes such as those associated with constellations (Epps and Oliveira 2013).
Finally, the holistic humanities of speaking approach we advocate here is of crucial relevance to communities of speakers, as well as to scholars. For communities, a focus on linguistically and culturally informed documentation is key; for them—unlike many of the fractured academic disciplines of today—the maintenance and transmission of their heritage prioritizes fully contextualized discursive events, a package of interrelated meanings that are not easily teased apart (see, e.g., Hill 2006 and Woodbury 2011). This focus can be seen, for example, in situations where the heritage language of the community is no longer spoken on a daily basis but is nevertheless retained in formulaic snippets that are brought to bear in special circumstances, such as ritual invocations or ceremonial songs (see, e.g., Jackson and Linn 2000).
At the same time, however, it is often the specialized genres that are the first to disappear when a community faces social and linguistic pressures from outside—the loss of such specialized registers as Damin (Hale 1992) or the kapiwaya song genre in communities of the northwest Amazon are just two examples (see Campbell and Muntzel 1989). Thus, for the vast majority of indigenous communities in the Americas and elsewhere, holistic documentation is a maximally urgent enterprise. It is also an enterprise in which communities can often become immediately engaged and in which speakers may be particularly eager to be involved. The documentation of verbal art and other specialized discourse forms is therefore an area in which scholarly and community priorities are perhaps most likely to align.
5.3. Toward documentation with a wider lens
A “humanities of speaking” approach and the holistic documentation it calls for encourage a re-examination of our strategies for engaging with texts, and a particular attention to the value of speech play and verbal art within the documentary enterprise—which we conceive of here in an interdisciplinary sense that (ideally) engages with linguistics, anthropology, and other disciplines. Here, we turn to methodological considerations of what to record, how to annotate, and how to understand the records we create as culturally, socially, and historically contextualized documents (see also Epps, Webster, and Woodbury 2016). In thinking through these considerations, we take as our principal axiom the Boasian view that an understanding of discursive categories and practices must be emergent: whether the documentation is undertaken by community members or outsiders, it must be closely attuned to community and speaker perspectives.
A first point that follows from this axiom is that documentation must be fundamentally grounded in participant-observation, and both linguistically and culturally attuned (see also Dobrin 2008; 2014). Thus views that linguists need not be involved in the daily life of the community since they are “just” working on language, or that anthropologists need not engage with the local language, are untenable within a holistic vision—as Boas maintained (while he also admitted the challenges involved), remarking, for example, that “we must insist that a command of the language is an indispensable means of obtaining accurate and thorough knowledge, because much information can be gained by listening to conversations of the natives and by taking part in their daily life” (Boas 1911b:60). In deciding what to record, therefore, a primary consideration should be what speakers think is important: What kinds of discourse do they view as most artistic? Most distinct? Most worthy of preservation for future generations? Naturally, speakers’ views about what is off-limits are also of crucial ethical importance; in some communities, certain types of discourse are understood as esoteric knowledge that should not be recorded or may only be recorded with certain constraints (see Debenport 2015).
Documentation must also take into account a range of discourse forms, with an eye to creating a maximally comprehensive record; thus recording choices should depend in part on what has already been recorded and what is still missing. But this consideration too should be guided by community perspectives. For documentation to include a meaningfully comprehensive set of genres, styles, and registers, it must approach these categories as they are understood by speakers—as opposed to arriving with a predefined “laundry list” that does not take local understandings fully into account (a potential risk of the sampling approach mentioned above). The importance of allowing discursive categories and themes to emerge through ethnographically grounded investigation was of course not lost on Boas, who emphasized the value of native-language texts by observing that these “probably contain all that is interesting to the narrators and … in this way a picture of their way of thinking and feeling will appear that renders their ideas as free from the bias of a European observer as is possible. Matters that are self-evident to the Indian and that strike the foreign observer disappear while points of view will be expressed that may be entirely overlooked by the student” (1935b, quoted in Berman 1996:219).
This reminder that ideas of genre, style, and register will be culturally and linguistically variable—even while they may be more widely appreciable—is exemplified in Seeger’s (1986) work with the Suyá people of central Brazil. As Seeger describes, the Suyá distinguish among three major genres: kaperni ‘speech’, which includes sub-genres ranging from relaxed conversation to formal address; iaren ‘telling’, which spans informal instruction, ceremonial instruction, and myth; and various types of ngere ‘song’. While Seeger’s English translations reflect the fact that features such as melody, temporal structure, timbre, and fixity of text are all relevant to different degrees among these genres, Seeger emphasizes that the correspondence between particular features and Suyá discursive categories did not match his own “Western” expectations, and that a more thorough understanding of the Suyá taxonomy of discourse and verbal art required careful ethnography.
Connections between genres, and the linguistic resources that these bring to bear, may also vary in interesting ways. For example, shamanic discourse in many Amazonian contexts links up closely to myth; this can be seen in Hup incantations, which frequently make specific reference to such mythical themes as the travels of ancestral figures within a snake-canoe. However, shamanic discourse among the Hupd’äh and other groups differs crucially from myth in that it is understood as enactive—the vocalization of a lived metaphysical voyage undertaken by the shaman, who literally experiences mythically relevant events and locations—rather than simply reportative. As Déléage (2010) explores for Yaminawa, and as also is the case for Hup (Ramos and Epps 2015), linguistic structure is brought to bear in establishing the distinct character of the speaker’s engagement with these texts, by means of evidentials: The narration of the myths themselves marks the speaker’s dissociation from the events by the consistent use of the reported evidential, while shamanic discourse expresses these mythic themes as experienced visually and firsthand.
Conversely, a humanities of speaking approach to discourse reveals ways in which norms and structures associated with particular genres, registers, and styles may “leak” into others, thus permeating discourse more generally and often strategically. For example, Hilaria Cruz (2014) discusses the way in which specific forms of parallelism associated with verbal art in San Juan Quiahije Chatino may turn up in daily conversation, imbuing the latter with a particular artistic flavor and invoking the frame of formal oratory, sometimes for rhetorical effect. Such observations underscore the importance of a noncompartmentalized view of discourse and verbal art more generally, while at the same time providing us with a deeper understanding of localized practices. They also call our attention to the artistry that is inherent in even the most mundane forms of discourse: As Bateson (1972:136) observes, “poetry is not a sort of distorted and decorated prose, but rather prose is poetry which has been stripped down and pinned to a Procrustean bed of logic.”
Similarly, a humanities of speaking approach must take a contextualized view of evaluative judgments, the aesthetic discriminations about speech play and verbal art. As Leavitt (2011:210) notes in discussing a return to a Boasian vision of linguistic relativity, “a Neo-Boasian linguistics would have to try to understand the motivating phenomena of language love, language hate, language curiosity, and delight in language(s).” In documentation, aesthetic considerations must be investigated and not imputed.
Examples of the relevance of a contextualized approach to aesthetics abound, particularly in the work of linguistic anthropologists. Keith Basso (1996:45– 46) has described how Western Apaches enjoy using Apache place-names, which they describe as being both pleasurable to say and, in their descriptive elegance, “like a picture.” Similarly, in Webster’s work with Navajo poets, “strong poems” were said to inspire reflection by being both highly descriptive and highly ambiguous. Webster has also documented words that Navajos enjoy saying (Webster 2015:23–24); not limited just to the Navajo language, these include English daintily (Webster 2015:85) and Navajo English sheeps (Webster 2015:70). Among the Arizona Tewa, Kroskrity (2012:162–64) found that “good” storytelling involves multi-modal poetic criteria such as péé;yu’u tú ‘story words’, archaic words, stylized facial expressions, paralinguistic and prosodic voice effects that often imitate the voices of characters, and other features.
It is important to note that what works aesthetically for one group may not work for another—and, of course, that aesthetic and poetic sensibilities can and do change and/or endure over time and space and across languages (see, e.g., Suslak 2010, Hull and Carrasco 2012, Kroskrity 2012, and Falconi 2013). For example, early anthropologists and linguists considered Western Mono and Yokuts verbal art as artistically impoverished due to the absence of particular conventions associated with English prose (Kroskrity 2015:142). They failed to attend to the aesthetic and poetic sensibilities that Western Mono and Yokuts speakers were attuned to (Kroskrity 2015). Moreover, as Hymes (1981; 1987) has noted, often such poetic discriminations were based not on the source-language original but rather on translations by linguists, anthropologists, and others—thus whole poetic traditions were evaluated (and dismissed) on the quality of the translations. Recent ethnographically informed ethnopoetics has suggested ways that questions of voice and narrative inequality can be addressed by attending to texts collected by previous generations of scholars (see Kroskrity and Webster 2015).
We must also realize that the criteria about “beauty” may not be only about aesthetics but also about, among other things, morality and an ethical life (see Witherspoon 1977 and Mitchell and Webster 2011). In Navajo, for example, hózhǫ́ ‘beauty, control, order, harmony’ and hochxǫ’ ‘ugly, disorderly, out of control’ are not just aesthetic criteria but also moral precepts. Things that are hochxǫ’ need, through ritual, to be restored to hózhǫ́. The efficaciousness of rituals is informed by the beauty of the curing chants; as David McAllester (1954:72) once noted, for many Navajos, “beauty is that which does something” (see also Field and Blackhorse 2002). This relevance of poetic devices for “action” beyond aesthetics is widely visible in a variety of shamanic traditions. For example, in the Hup incantations discussed above, parallelism in the text is understood as literally enacting the shaman’s experiences at each phase of his metaphysical journey. Similarly, metaphor in these texts does not simply evoke comparisons among entities; it brings about their metaphysical manipulation as relevant to the goals of the incantation, through such shamanic actions as enclosing the length of a path within an ancestral canoe that is simultaneously a uirapixuna snake (Clelia rustica), resistant to the venom of other snakes, in order to protect travelers.
A humanities of speaking also must move beyond a stance of external observation, recording, and analysis of “behavior” and a focus only on the static products of individual creativity. It must describe and account for individual capacities as well. For example, Parry (1930) and Lord (2000) explored the capacities of individuals for memorizing and producing long epic texts, and Cruz’s (2014) documentation of Chatino traditional parallelistic oratory is presented not only in terms of its products but in terms of the syntactic and semantic strategies that allow speakers to produce parallelistic verse rapidly and extemporaneously.
The holistic documentation we advocate here sets a scene for acknowledging the uses of multiple or mixed languages in discourse (see, e.g., Himmelmann 1998, Woolard 1998, and Woodbury 2011). While traditional approaches to language documentation have tended to involve a focus on only one language—normally the primary or heritage language of the community— speech communities all around the world regularly make use of multiple codes. This multilingual usage is thus an important part of these communities’ discursive ecology. In such cases, multilingualism is also likely to be an integral component of speech play and verbal art, as illustrated by the interlingual puns used by speakers of Navajo and English, discussed in 5.2 above. Other examples are widely encountered in Amazonian communities, where song repertoires often involve sets of songs from various languages (see, e.g., Fausto, Franchetto, and Heckenberger 2008) or where norms of “passive multilingualism” coupled with “active monolingualism” result in regular discursive interactions between interlocutors who are each speaking a distinct language (see Epps, forthcoming). While documentation of such multilingual discourses may pose significant challenges, we urge researchers to embrace these contexts as much as possible, rather than to ignore them.
The considerations we raise here are relevant to Hill’s (2006:613) call to pay explicit attention to language usage—the specific contexts and circumstances in which discourse is embedded. While Boas’s work set the stage for a concern with usage, it was not in fact a priority within the Early Americanist tradition; moreover, Boas was less concerned with the voice of the individual speaker in documentation and with the ways in which the relationships involved in the act of documentation may shape the texts themselves. However, a contemporary humanities of speaking should attend to the polyphony of voices and the dynamic contexts that produce the texts we collect, as expressed in Dobrin’s (2012:22) call to attend to the “implicitly dialogic nature of even monologic speech forms,” such that “the speaker’s ‘voice’ ought to be an important concept for documentary researchers to incorporate into their analytic repertoires—at least as important as the concept of endangered ‘voices’ that is so frequently appealed to today. Speakers are never just talking; they are always also representing themselves to someone (Joseph 2004).”
The attention to usage and to the deeper discursive ecologies and ontologies that we stress here has further implications for our methodological approaches to the annotation of documentary texts. Naturally, deeper annotations require more time, and any documentary effort will therefore involve a nested collection of documentary texts that Evans and Dench (2006:25) liken to a set of Russian dolls—“a core of well-analysed material that may not greatly exceed in quantity that produced by more traditional methods, with an expanded set of roughly transcribed material and a huge amount of raw data without significant transcription or translation.” However, in the annotations that we are able to provide, we need to prioritize a contextualization in the ethnographic context, with attention to issues of usage, speaker’s voice, and broader cultural background. In some cases, such annotation is essential for even a basic understanding of the text. Sherzer (1987) discusses the specific “cultural logic” behind the non-linear temporality of a Kuna myth, in which the narrator “jumps” around from one place and time period to another in a way that seems highly illogical to a European-American audience. Similarly, Epps, Webster, and Woodbury (2016) describe a Hup conversation in which a discussion about the length of the interlocutors’ hair invokes mythic themes regarding a selection of leaves at a mythical time of origin, when each people chose a different leaf that determined the kind of hair they were to have. Without the exegesis provided afterward by speakers and an awareness of the wider cultural and mythic context, this conversation would be highly opaque even when fully glossed and translated.
Contemporary directions in documentation offer new vistas of exploration and possibility. We have come a long way since the days when Boas chafed at the constraints that dictation placed on his text collection, as expressed in his “Introductory” (1917:1): “The slowness of dictation that is necessary for recording texts makes it difficult for the narrator to employ that freedom of diction that belongs to the well-told tale, and consequently an unnatural simplicity of syntax prevails in most of the dictated texts.” Now we have a plethora of new technologies at our disposal—such as video, which is still underutilized in many documentary projects (see Seyfeddinipur 2011)—that invite more naturalistic data collection, richer contextualization, and faster and more accurate annotation. It is our responsibility to make maximum use of these resources, while not losing sight of the fundamental methodological lessons that have been handed down to us by Boas and others—most importantly, that of respecting and listening to the voices of the speakers around us.
6. Conclusion
The Boasian concern with texts remains an unfinished project. As fashions in linguistics and anthropology have changed, the Boasian textual focus has at various turns been marginalized, but it has nevertheless maintained a position as hinge-point for a multiplicity of perspectives and approaches to the study of language and culture. As we have outlined here, the Boasian philological tradition takes texts as the starting point for all linguistic and ethnological analysis; it prioritizes the study of language on its own terms and within its wider cultural context, and emphasizes an engagement with the perspectives of speakers. This agenda, we submit, is fundamentally inclusive, and elements of the Boasian paradigm run through many different currents within linguistics and linguistic anthropology (5 above). Recent movements in linguistics and linguistic anthropology offer new opportunities for us to take lessons from that paradigm as well as to build on it. In linguistic anthropology, the growing concern with questions of voice and of translation can be usefully integrated into an expanded Boasian text-centered approach. So too, a renewed interest in the philologically inspired concern with a broadly conceived ethnopoetics—centered on (but not limited to) the exploration of speech play and verbal art—pays careful attention to linguistic details as well as to how they are embedded in and constitutive of broader cultural contexts. Such approaches remind us of the relevance of a linguistic anthropology that engages language in use from an anthropological perspective. Language, in its full and multifaceted sense, is of import for a more holistic and humanistic vision of anthropology—reminding us of the centrality of human beings and language to the Boasian anthropological project.
Within linguistics, a Boasian emphasis on texts and the voices they embody has been perhaps most clearly evident in the emerging disciplinary trajectory of documentary linguistics, with its focus on a language-in-community context. This renewed attention to texts represents the most recent phase in a complex series of contributions in the field that have re-evaluated pieces of the Boasian paradigm over the past century (and particularly since the 1960s), resulting in a shift that has been gradually collecting steam as those pieces fit together. This shift has moved us closer to a holistic perspective on language in use, embedded within its cultural and social context.
The emerging perspectives we consider here call for a renewed engagement with texts as linguistic, ethnographic, historical, philological, and artistic documents, which offer a richly multifaceted understanding of human experience. In the same vein, they call for a stronger collaboration between linguistics and anthropology, which takes seriously Hockett’s (1973:675)—very Boasian—view that “linguistics without anthropology is sterile, anthropology without linguistics is blind.” Such a partnership will allow the reconfiguration of the Boasian paradigm to gel in a way that may be truly transformative. It is this simultaneous reinvigorating and carrying forward of the Boasian agenda that we call for here, framed within the holistic approach that we identify as a “humanities of speaking.”
Notes
1 . We thank the many Hup, Dâw, Navajo, Cup’ik/Yup’ik, and Chatino speakers who have talked with us over the years about their verbal art. We are also grateful for discussions, both long ago and recent, with Natalia Bermúdez, Hilaria Cruz, Lise Dobrin, Paul Friedrich, Mary Haas, Aimee Hosemann, Dell Hymes, Virginia Hymes, Blackhorse Mitchell, Leo Moses, Danilo Paiva Ramos, Joel Sherzer, and Michael Silverstein, as well as with members of our jointly taught Fall 2015 Speech Play and Verbal Art class (including each other). Epps also thanks FOIRN and FUNAI, and Webster the Navajo Nation Historic Preservation Office, for granting them permits to do work, respectively, in the Upper Rio Negro region and on the Navajo Nation. Finally, we thank an anonymous IJAL reviewer for perspicuous comments and suggestions for this article.
2 . Volumes 26–28 (1960–62), however, contained no texts nor even reviews of texts.
3 . Boas’s (1923) Keresan text—though analyzed morphologically in footnotes—not only lacks any supporting free translations, it even lacks translations at the word level. It reveals, we believe, a view of translation as a potentially expendable—or expandable—level of annotation or interpretation, rather than as an object ontologically equivalent to the text itself (see Evans and Sasse 2007 for further discussion of this distinction).
4 . nsʔwi3 kuweʔ12 tu32-ke2. tseʔ3, to use Rasch and Suárez Martínez’s (forthcoming) more adequate representation of Yaitepec Chatino.
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